Alpha (2018)

Alpha arrives as a prehistoric survival tale told largely in constructed languages, which is a bold commercial choice and an even bolder hedge against the sermon. Kodi Smit-McPhee plays Keda, a young hunter who tumbles off a cliff, is presumed dead, and must walk home across the Upper Paleolithic with an injured wolf for company. There is no narrator in the domestic cut. There is no voice explaining what we should feel. The film simply shows a boy feeding a wolf before feeding himself, and lets that gesture carry the weight. By the standards of the current moment, it is almost shockingly quiet.

Where the film does glance toward contemporary sensibilities, it does so gently and without conviction. The wolf, presumed male throughout, turns out to be female, and a mother, which the film treats as a closing flourish instead of a thesis. The human women remain at the margins of the tribe, tending wounds and worrying. The cast is overwhelmingly white, which suits a story set in Ice Age Europe and reflects no deliberate effort at anything else. A few non-European faces appear among the hunters, and the camera never remarks on them. The setting, the last ice age, could have carried an environmental parable. It does not. The bison are food, the snow is weather, and the frozen man in his tent is a source of arrows.

None of this is a criticism, exactly. It is a classification. Alpha wants to be a boy-and-his-dog story with better fur, and it succeeds on those modest terms. The dialogue is sparse, the lessons are shown, and the preachiness that might have attached itself to a film about the first domestication of wolves never arrives. What we get is a survival picture with handsome photography and a final image of humans and wolves hunting together. The cultural apparatus of the 2020s has little purchase here. A rare thing. A film that simply is.